Sixth Sunday of Easter- Year B: May 6, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. John Forbis, OHC

Sixth Sunday of Easter-Year B- Sunday, May 6, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. John  Forbis, OHC 

Love may possibly be one of the most used words in the English language and maybe in other languages as well. I’m guilty of overusing it as many others, especially, in my outbursts of great enthusiasms. 

They are often only outbursts … about inanimate objects and events. When it comes to people, I’ve experienced and have expressed the extraordinary guileless passion for and from another. That reciprocation has been particularly poignant for me in my life here in this community. 

My brothers have influenced and prepared me a great deal to preach on this Gospel today. However, at other times, I have occasionally used the word begrudgingly or to manipulate and hurt others.

Love can so easily be bought for a price. And that cost can be very expensive, costing us our mental and physical health, our integrity and even our souls. For example, Americans throughout the last two and a half centuries have professed their love of country. But what that can look like is injustice and inequality supported and even enhanced by a system of selfish greed, racism, hatred and violence. It can insist on the right to brandish weapons of mass destruction turning our schools, our churches, our streets and diplomacy into war zones. This kind of love for country develops at the expense of its own people, even life itself in all its forms, embattled by vicious attacks from eroding environmental regulation and legislation. This devotion is confused with an idolatry of power and dominance. Life’s price then is cut drastically.

We each might claim that we love our neighbor. But that’s just it. Love can so often be a claim, an utterance only or a claim on another or the world we think we own. In contrast, Jesus uses the word sparingly because to him, love is costly as well and inestimable. The love he proposes makes no claims. He gives up all pretensions to lording over us all, as Paul so eloquently articulates, “Christ Jesus, who though, he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God to be exploited but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  And in human likeness, he lived as those who were marginalized by societal love, died by the violence of that deception and rose by the devotion he had to his equal, overflowing to us through the Holy Spirit and to which he commands to us to show each other within this extraordinary mystery.

It gives away as he gave away his own self. Jesus raises us up from being servants, even slaves to the intimacy of being his friends. Jesus lays down his life for his friends. Augustine depicts this humility and elevation beautifully, “You have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Jesus has taught us everything he learned from God. We know already deep within us all we need to know whether we choose to or not. And it really does come down to choice. Jesus made his choice. His choice becomes explicit by his life journey to Golgotha on the Cross. He travelled this road with a singular will more fierce than any will or desire that greed, violence and hatred can possibly tame.
Jesus’ other choice is God, and in many ways, Jesus’ heart is restless until he rests in God. That longing for God is no secret to his disciples. His intimate relationship with his Father can’t but pour out in water and blood upon us. This laying down of his life for us is a consequence of God loving us. It is the ultimate consequence of the Incarnation or is it? Well … yes and no.

Jesus says on the Cross, “It is finished.”  Yet, it has only just begun. Jesus rises in a passion that defies any other claims of and on love that excludes, disempowers and inflicts great suffering. As we gape dumbfounded, at this unimaginable vision, we are not only invited but commanded to love and be loved in the truth and freedom of being Jesus’ friend and God’s beloved. He must know that we are capable of such a commitment to him and each other, otherwise he wouldn’t call us to this revolution. For this Jesus chose us.